order / disorder

Had some wide ranging conversations about various aspects of education in New Zealand today.  All are anecdotal and several relate to personal experiences of my family.

Before we emigrated to NZ, we read up about what opportunities there were in learning, elearning, learning technology etc.  The government made a big thing about how NZ was at the forefront of technology use.  One thing that sticks in my mind is a statement that major IT companies use NZ as a test bed for new technology and often NZ has things before anywhere else in the world.  That was mentioned in one of my conversations today and the comment was that NZ cherry-picks lots of fancy bits of technology, programs, etc but then doesn’t put in the infrastructure to support them.  The fancy bits can get used in an academic or commercial environment but there is no spread out to the general populace.

Broadband is a case in point.  At a very rough guess going from anecdote and support calls, NZ seems to be where the UK was about 5 or 7 years ago in terms of broadband provision.  I was told that Telecom used to advertise that you could get broadband anywhere in NZ.  This was by someone who has been told that they will never get broadband where they live (in the country but not remote).  They can’t even get satellite broadband because of the topography.  In terms of speed, home Internet connection seems slow here but that is perceptual as I don’t have any UK figures to compare with.  In relation to education (which is what this post is about!) there are effects relating to the disparity of access between people and locations.  Working in the tertiary sector, this is particularly evident where academics can access resources at LAN speeds and students at a distance are struggling with dial up.

You also have the effect that students aren’t exposed to the range of materials that they could be.  They get guided to standard resources through the LMS / VLE but much of the increase in quality learning should come through serendipitous and informal channels.  If you are on dial-up, not only is cost a factor but there is the tediousness of waiting for documents to resolve on your screen.  I remember that well.  Mentioning cost reminds me that students here are charged for internet access from campus if they are accessing any site that is outwith the university Intranet.  I was quite shocked when I first heard that and in fact still find it hard to come to terms with.  I’m not sure where the culture divide is – were we just mollycoddled in the UK are is NZ HE penny-pinching? Whatever, the result is a restriction on the resources that students could have access to.

Back in schools, access to computers by students seems limited, as is access to technology by staff.  There has been a scheme to provide laptops for staff but our local school doesn’t seem to have then been enabling in terms of letting staff use their laptops directly in teaching.  They can prepare and print but there are few data projectors, no digital whiteboards and no student access to computers in the class.  This of course is a single example and may be atypical – I have heard that there are clusters of schools with extra IT provision.  By itself, this doesn’t mean that education in schools is any less effective than what was happening 10 or 20 years ago.  It does seem to imply though that kids aren’t being exposed to the tools and resources that they might be expected to work with when they leave school or graduate.

The above might seem like a bit of a whinge and parts probably are!  Education and its environment in the UK wasn’t perfect by any means.  That doesn’t mean that comparisons aren’t worth making.  It also helps me mull over what are the really important changes and how that effects what we suggest as elearning options to staff.  There was actually a lot more said today which I’m too tired for at the moment.  It might perhaps come up in a later post with more reflection on my part.